Post by The Mouth on Jun 2, 2014 23:43:06 GMT -8
15th December, 2013
Liverpool, England
It was time. The Archbishop had mandated that her remaining packs were to gather in their own places and practice a Ritae then they would go on a Hunt.
This, apparently, is a Thing.
But each pack would arrive on it’s own, having their own vinculum reinforced and drawn to a central place for a festival where three humans, reputed badasses, would be told they could take weapons and tools and go forth into the night to survive until dawn. The survivors would then get a share of treasure; literal fucking treasure. Turns out our Miss Ramirez might have been a privateer with her Sire at some point so rumor went. So far only one human, a woman from Chelsea, managed to win by the novel expediency of punching out a cop, pissing on him, and then patiently waiting the five minutes it took for his radio to register that he was prone.
Before that she’d managed to torpor one over eager lick by luring him out in front of a truck, got a pack mate of that one to follow her to hobo town; they never found his remains - Hobos have some fucking teeth in England, and then got the Ductus by running into an Arsenal bar and when he showed she screamed that the Chelsea loving fucker had laid a hand on her. He was stomped into red paste by the bar inhabitants.
Don’t fuck with drunk soccer hooligans in their place of power.
The Old Bill arrived, was a wee harsh on her, and couldn’t understand why she was laughing the entire time. The beating was less than the Sabbat would have done; she spent a nice night in lockup, made bail, and was promptly given her reward and the Embrace by Ramirez.
Trading most of a pack of over eager fucks in trade for an extremely capable childe was a good bargain for Ramirez. I believe they call her childe ‘the Bitch.’ You can hear the capital letter.
Of the forty remaining Sabbat I have to kill 8. Two ducti, a priest, and a pack of four. And Vycheslav; can’t have him running around. Selim is helping me because wholesale slaughter is really super hilarious for him and he wants to, as he put it, ‘get his blades wet.’
I hate it when he watches Jersey Shore.
Our first target is the pack of 4; they hunt as a group and tend to work the same part of town. They like to prey on Muslim women coming home late from their jobs. Doing their part to ‘thin the damn Camel Cunts down a notch.’
Selim is really excited about this group. Killing them will raise the class in the neighborhood and punish racist shiteheads.
They are lead by a Brujah, have two caitif, and a Malkavian. All of them are about twenty years dead. And they are really into their pack tactics.
Selim has disguised himself and I as women. We are wearing burkas in order to make the illusion a little easier but Selim assures me that women have been moving in such clothes in such ways to elicit interest for centuries. “After all, how do you think babies come about?” He laughed for a good minute after that one.
We’re walking through the area, chatting back and forth. Selim has given me a spattering of Arabic so I can follow along. We know we have our crew when we spot a menacing man in a leather jacket and a shaved head behind us. He grabs his crotch and whistles, so we hurry away from him down the street. A block down he’s still following us when another bloke with too much metal in his face approaches from the side. We duck into an alley, hoping to get past them by going around when we see the other two coming from the front of us, the two behinds are laughing and hooting.
They say a bunch of things that are really not polite. Seriously; my countrymen can be right cunts at times and this is one of them.
We let them get close, as we cower and cling to each other… The skinhead grabs for me and the sawed off bar gun unloads two barrels of buck shot into his face.
His head splashed away. At first I wasn’t sure if he was a lick, but then his body decayed unnaturally fast.
I hear Selim start to work with his knives while I catch the other one starting to realize things had gone south. I’ve dropped the scatter gun and pulled my second one; he’s just started to turn around when I catch up to him and place it against his spine, blowing both barrels through his guts.
His legs stop working so well. I check back and Selim has just removed the head from one of the assailants, his other knife having punctured the heart of his victim. You destroy the heart and a vampire loses a tremendous amount of vitae; if these guys were feeding like this they might be already low.
I take my time to reload; as I watch the bastard’s spine is starting to click back into place, muscle and intestine pulling back in. I put the barrels against the fucker’s neck. I’d say something but fuck, this isn’t American cinema.
One more loud boom and the lead splashes his brains like a watermelon dropped from the top of the St. Paul’s Cathedral.
We took these guys out because they were the youngest and the easiest. We flee from the scene, in our burkas, black and flapping. Selim once again has us as women and we scream from the alley way in case anyone investigates. Ramierez assures us she has people in CID who can explain why the bodies decayed so much so quickly.
The cops will assumed the community protected it’s own and it will be unsolved. Selim insured this by using kitchen knives, cheap ones, to do his murder. I used cheap buckshot and sawed-offs, so not really an ideal ballistics scenario.
Off we go.
Thirty minutes later and we are outside the a lovely enough house in a new development towards the edge of town. This is a very new development and is still under construction, nice place for doing dark deeds in the middle of the night; burn the place down when you leave, thank you very much. A little note from a local environmental group and bam, instant suspects.
The bloke here is a Toreador. He’s into sick shit, but his priest has been wanting to move up the ladder; we’re here to make that happen.
He had one little stop at a convenience mart; I needed a pizza, a 2-liter and a pint of ice cream. I have a jacket with a name tag that says ‘My Name is Edgar!’.
I spray some glue on the back of the jacket and slap a patch of a well known pizza shop logo on it.
I knock on the door of the house with lights on the front porch, car running. The street is empty of cars and people, but music is thumping from the house. I’m holding an insulated bag with a steaming pizza in it.
The door opens and a chick who is waaaay to into the the raccon eyes look pops the door open and has a drawling “Whaaaat the fuck you want?”
“Uh, is uh, Kevin here? I got a pizza, for, uh, Kevin Schaltzburg?”
She looks at me for a moment, her eyes sharpening. They must have had their vinculum not too long ago; Kindred Vitae can get you a little fucked up if you aren’t too sharp to begin with. “Yo, we got a Kevin Shaltzburg here?” Her voice is high, buzzing, and pleading.
From the back I hear a “What the Fuck!?” and then stomping, mad footsteps.
“Who would dare to use that name before me? I am Melchior, you fucks!”
I’m a little agog. In front of me is a man. A mostly naked man. At least where it counts. Spattered in blood, covered in latex, chains, and holding a whip in his hand, and about 500 hundred pounds. Vampires tend to thin out a bit in the change, so he had to have been fucking huge before that. I could see the outfit he was wearing was struggling to hold together under the strain.
Time to set that latex free.
“You, uh, ordered a pizza Mr. Shaltzburg?”
He turns purple. Straight goes from pale, to red, to puce. “Don’t call me that!” he screams.
I flinch in my role. “But, it’s your favorite order, according to the computer? Triple meat with extra cheese?”
Skinny goth bitch is behind him, laughing. She manages to be silent but then a snort comes out of her mouth parts. Vitae is streaking her mascara.
Kevin, or I guess ‘Melchior’ now, goes purple black, then immediately goes to being pale. “Come in, come in, I must grab my wallet.” I hesitantly enter the house and see four other blokes on the couch; one of whom does not fit. He’s a young man in a hoody, clearly out of it from blood loss. Every time gets a little too aware they raise his wrist and the vampires sip a little more.
The boy manages “-Momma?” before I see them grab a wrist and neatly nip’n’sip.
Kevin opens a door, I hear a screaming moan, then the door closes. I don’t hear what happens downstairs; but a minute later he’s back up with a wallet.
“Here we are… That’s 20 quid, with tip, right?” the fat man purrs out.
“They added a delivery fee. So, 22 now. But I’m glad you’re still ordering with us sir.” I hand off the soda and the ice cream to goth girl, and put my hand in the back of the bag. I open the bag up and hand the pizza to Kevin, who frowns with his money in hand.
“I’m sorry, but this isn’t the pizza…” He’s looking at the box, which he is absolutely right on. Nothing like his old pizza delivery company.
Neither is the shotgun in my hand from the hole I cut in the back in the bag. Kevin’s face is erased in a sheet of flame from the Dragon’s Breath round - Selim gave me one for the evening.
The resulting fire and chaos allows me to slip out the front door; back in the car and Selim and I are off to target #3.
Target #3 is a ductus/priest. She fulfills both roles with two personalities; a little odd but hey, Malkavian.
We get to her pack’s haunts in an hour. Ramirez is calling her meeting in an hour, where we will hit our last targets.
An apartment building; they are the worst. Have to be very tight, very controlled, can’t mess about.
We creep through the lower floors up to floor 5. There are two more floors above us, but the target is on 5, so we creep down the hall.
We get to apartment 9, and the door is already open. The pack is all gathered and their Priestess is guiding them through the rites. Her arms are raised as if supplicating the heavens, vitae trickling down her arms and spattering like little rubies on her white silk shift.
She finishes her chant, and even though we are unseen she calls out, “Killers! I am prepared for my end!”
I drop my mental efforts to cloud my presence and I see Selim do the same. The others, there are four of them, they start forward with a growl but the Priestess throws out her arm. “Stop! I have forseen this, and I have known it was my doom. This sacrifice prepares the way for you to live. My pack, my children, I love you as I have loved no others life or death and my vision saw you fall with me. Follow Ramirez, though the path seems treacherous, she shall lead our Sword in a new direction, become her Shield and learn the Childer in the ways of righteousness.”
As one they intone, “Yes Mother.”
I draw my sword and step forward. The Priestess kneels, smiles blindingly. I realize that her glamour aside she is an old woman, the hair is gray despite the smooth face. “You know Ileana Cardae.”
Shocked, I nod.
“Carry these words to her: The blood has heard, and listened. It may not understand, but it knows.” She bows her body forward and shouts into the floor, “Do it!”
My arms come up of their own accord and I chop down, as if aided by some power, and my blade shears through her neck with little resistance. She crumbles to ash before my eyes, and I look at Selim for reassurance.
He is shaken, praying. We leave quickly and try to pretend it didn’t happen.
But I will remember the words.
Our last two targets are going to be at the Hunt.
We arrive at the warehouse on the docs. It is 2am, and I’m thinking of Seattle in the winter, and not London for some reason.
Inside Ramirez is talking.
“We all here? Good, my last two are here. Everyone, share your grievances.”
There is a babbling for a moment, then goth girl comes forward. “We are under attack! An assassin came to our haven, burned it down, and killed Melchior!”
“And I have received word that the 12th street Prowlers have been discovered without their heads,” Vycheslav adds.
The robed Kindred step forward as a group and speak in unison, “Our lady gave her life so we could live.”
Ramirez nods. “Yes. She did.”
The Archbishop pauses. “We have been Sabbat for a long time, brothers and sisters. But what is it getting us?”
Murmurs as the crowd processes this heresy. “We are the Sword of Caine, Archbishop! Surely you can see the struggle is to free ourselves from the chains and tyranny of the Ancients.” Vycheslav is fervent, despite looking like a pimp who got robbed.
“Right. The Sword of Caine… But what if we weren’t? The Sword of Caine, that is? What if we were just used against our clan founders as a play in the Jihad? I ask this because I’ve fought for the Sword for hundreds of years, Vycheslav, and I don’t think we are one iota closer to victory since we gathered at Thornes.”
“Why are you saying these things Ramirez?” Vycheslav is nearly in tears. I think he really cares about Ramirez in some way.
She looks at him a little sadly. “Because when I listen to my blood and my Beast it tells me that the assassinations and the assaults having nothing to do with the Book of Nod and the Sword of Caine. Caine’s grandchildren care little for their progeny and we’ve never killed anything older than a millenia; in fact far younger. We are sending our own Childer and their Childer and Their Childer out to slay our own generation Vycheslav. We spend their lives like water poured upon the desert. And for what?” Ramirez is way too reasonable. But you can just hear the moment when she decided that the Sabbat were fools.
“For the Glory of Caine! For the Freedom to choose…” Vycheslav starts to rant.
“To choose how to die? By the fangs of the ancients, or the fangs of the elders? Or the fangs of their peers? Do not be fooled by rhetoric Vycheslav; I am no Giangalezzo. I am not betraying us to the Camarilla; I propose we go back to our roots. We started as a revolution; against the perfidy and corruption of our Elders. We changed with the times to fight the forces of hunger that will awaken for our blood. I say that the crusade is failed; our resources dimmed, and our blood has bought nothing.” Ramirez rips out each word, flung like razors at the crowd gathered before her. “I say that our own elders have grown too much like that which we rebelled against. I say that we are not winning this game and neither is the Camarilla - So who is?”
Vycheslav is growling, “Your conspiracy theories do nothing to hide your traitorous words…”
“Traitorous? Because I view our blood as a finite resource to guarded and spent with care? Because I’m tired of rigging vinculums for favors here and there? Of watching the Monomacy used not as a tool of determining the strong but as one of political control? We are done, Vycheslav. We can keep our ways, find a new path, a new way to play the game. Not the Camarilla, but the Anarchs. A name only to describe how we make a new contract, a new pact. A new Sabbat.” Ramirez is winding down, Vycheslav takes this as weakness.
“You have gone insane! The Consistory, hell, your own clan will turn on you! You can’t do this Ramirez, it will be a betrayal…” Vycheslav trails down as the fury fills Ramirez.
“Like you betrayed me, Vycheslav? You signed a pact with Yuria! That you would rule here as Archbishop and let your ‘Sister Yuria’ seek the hearts blood of every Elder in southern England. You killed my priests, my Bishops, my Templars. You have been planning this for a decade and you speak of traitors?” Ramirez throws some papers snatched from her waistband onto the ground. They are copies of the correspondence with Yuria starting a week after Chase Covington was sentenced to death.
The first time.
Vycheslav stares at the papers, and then sheer hate pours from him. “I knew what you were planning, even if I couldn’t prove it of your allies. She told me about your ‘plans’ and how it would be. I had to keep us pure, had to keep us clean, from your filth. I had hoped you would see the error of your ways after I named your allies and supporters to her pet Roman…”
I watch as the crowd steps back from Vycheslav, except for six some odd licks too loyal or dumb to know how badly this was going to go. Goth girl has lead her whole pack away from Vychy, so she clearly was the up’n comer.
“Fuck you Vycheslav Rasilovich!” I scream.
Okay, don’t know where that came from.
“Who dares-?” he manages as I charge up to him.
“The Anarch representative. I came here at Ramirez’s invitation. I’m from motherfucking Seattle. Heard of it?” Gotta keep the momentum...
“A city on the West Coast of America, yes, but…”
Momentum. “We have this ancient thing out there. You know that? Heard some crazy bullshit rumors out of there? Guy named Siegfried? Vancouver? Has a lot of werewolf pals?”
“Rumors, lies, yes. But-”
“Fuck. You. It’s true. The Tremere started killing Gangrel in job lots out there, don’t know why. But something asleep under Vancouver stirred. Now the werewolves and the Gangrel are becoming besties - Hearing about that?”
“Propagan-”
“Fuck. You. Thrice. It’s true. The Gangrel are independent, they are Camarilla, they are Anarch, they are… Fuck all. Everywhere you look there are schisms, breaks, and movements. Things are breaking down because the Ancients stir - But also because the fuckery you are doing. Is. Not. Working.”
“Look you Anarch piece of-”
“And four times fuck you. If you had a thing worth listening too I would have heard it by now. In fact I wouldn’t be able to hear it until the Infernalist took the dick out of your mouth. We know how to handle a Infernalist in the Anarchs - We don’t torture the shit out of people thinking that a dirty fucker is among them. We just look out for each other and when a guy gets out of line we take him out back behind the woodshed. So, you even fuck that up.”
Vycheslav, a renowned Inquisitor, loses his shit. I get a back hand the flings me across the room. My face does not feel good, at all.
The Fiend stalks towards me and Selim appears out of no where. “Vycheslav, I remember those nights when we were Neonates in the Revolt. This childe is mine to watch over, for our brotherhood, do not advance.”
Huh. I guess the old guys really do know each other.
“Selim…” Vycheslav hisses out. He’s in a frenzy, but riding it. And he just drops out, like that. No effort of will, just drops…
Wow. Something to be said for that, whatever it is.
“I will kill him, Selim. And it seems I will have to kill you as well.”
“So be it. Archbishop Julia Maria y Ramirez, I request of you a boon! There shall be a Monamacy between Vycheslav and myself. My ties to the Sabbat are ancient, as old as Vycheslav’s - I have partaken of the rights and oaths of brotherhood; do you recognize my claim to the Sabbat?”
This is some old form kind of thing. The foundations of the three major sects, if Anarchs could be considered such, are all tied up hundreds of years ago. I know the Assamites were the demons of the East and had allied themselves to the Great Revolt against the Elders…
“I do, as does Vycheslav. We have all drunk from the same cup; Selim is a Brother in the Crusade.” Ramirez is somehow holding this group together when it occurs to me that they have no middle class. Most of the licks we took out were young, maybe twenty years dead at most. The Priestess was the oldest by far, and she went willingly or the building would have been destroyed…
They have no Ancillae to speak of. You last longer than fifty years in the Sabbat and you are an old timer. Two hundred? That makes you an Elder. And anything over that is probably in a leadership role because they have survived so long… Man, that makes the power pyramid even more pointy than the Cam.
So, all these young Kindred are watching their parents and grandparents have a fight. Ouch.
“Now you use the forms you are abandoning?” Vycheslav spits at Ramirez.
Ramirez won’t meet Vycheslav’s eyes. “I never said abandon, I said find a new way. Dogma is doing nothing but killing us Vycheslav - The choice is the fangs of our own or the fangs of our foes; I’d like to remove one set of fangs from the equation.”
“Fine. I do acknowledge your claim. Shall we fight blind?”
Selim shakes his head. “No. We borrowed the Monomacy from the Lasombra, let us do this in our way.”
And they fought.
Selim pulled his sword and knife; Vycheslav strips down and starts to grow incredibly rapidly. In an eye blink he is two feet taller, covered in coarse hair and oily black chitin, his face a lizard/insectoid horror.
They circle one another, then Selim moves in with a blur and there is a crack as Selim’s sword shatters into red hot fragments. They step back, and I realize that this is going to be a move/counter move battle.
“I liked that sword, Vycheslav. It was a favorite. Clearly you have grown in power since we last fought.” Selim is poised and ready with his dagger, a curved thing like a crescent moon.
Vycyeslav’s face moves in something that could be called a smile if nightmares dripping black ichor are considered ‘smiley’. He moves an arm lazily through the air and we see arrows form from the air itself and speed towards Selim- And the arrows break into shards just before hitting him.
Vycheslav looks confused for a moment then roars. Selim chuckles, “My sire, may he live long these nights, is a Sorcerer. He prepared me for foes like yourself.”
Sorcerer? Fucking Selim is a… MOTHER FUCKER.
The fight continues like this for an hour, move, counter move, move. At each interval they break, and I realize that they are not spending blood in the same that I would. They are slow, methodical, and above all preserve their resources.
And boy is this boring.
Time to get my last target.
This would by Vycheslav’s second, his Childe. I spot him in the group of seven die hards, stony and silent, he has the bone ridges on his/her scalp. Androgyny, apparently a thing with Tzimisce.
I go to the outside of the warehouse and Summon him/her. Everyone is focused on the fight; so I have a chance at this. I wait by the car and grab a tool from the back seat. I cloak myself in the shadows, and wait.
Pretty soon Vycheslav’s child comes wandering out, he/she getting within three feet of me. I watch her, pretty sure it’s a her now, closer her eyes and then look straight at me. “I have my sire’s magicks. I can see you, Anarch.” I can hear the 'k' in magick, the way she says it. What a fucking wanker.
Suddenly she’s got bone spurs and claws and scary shit coming off her. I can hear dogs in the distance, so I know what that means, her friends are coming.
So, I swing with my tool. Her arm sinks into my gut like it was made of soft pudding, and she’s ripped her shark toothed and barbed limb free and clear taking bits of me with it. Her face is lunging for my neck - she is so fast - with every tooth a fang in a mouth far too wide.
The tool connects. The side of her head, at the temple, the weaker spot of the skull… I just shoved a metal rod, medical grade precision steel, with channels cut into it, into her skull. The rod has a square pointed tip, made for piercing through tough things like Kindred bones. It is attached to a canister that is insulated and holds about four oz of liquid nitrogen.
Contact pops an internal seal, and the hammer/pick looking device then spews pressurized nitrogen at very cold temperatures through the needle.
She gets the brain freeze from hell.
It doesn’t turn her head into an easily shattered object; it just increases the internal psi in her skull by several orders of magnitude as the nitrogen expands and boils off, quickly. The skull which now has a hole in it’s side.
My tool pops free with a hiss-crack and a puff of escaping gas. Then brains squirt out the side of her head until enough gas escapes to equalize pressure. My assailant falls to her knees and shrieks as she loses, well, her mind.
I thumb my quick release and the cartridge drops. I load another in and move in just as Ms. I-Can’t-Decide-My-Gender-This-Week-Because-I’m-So-Cool shakily stands up. She looks at me dumbly when I do the same thing, just to her heart.
Vampires are mystic creatures, but we follow a few rules. First, the heart is a thing. Two, the circulatory system is largely intact for a looooong time. And unlike the brain, when you inject pressurized gas into a circulatory system it tends cause embolisms and burst blood vessels. Kindred are more resilient, but I just added a lot of pressure to a system not designed to handle actual air.
Blood bursts forth from her nose, her mouth, her ears. Blood jets out from the hole in her head. Blood seeps from her skin and her left eye literally pops.
“Fuck your ‘magick’. Only shit heads use a ‘k’ in magic - It’s spelled with a ‘c’ like with science - you fucked up fleshcrafting bitch.” The words, I use them because I used to think they were funny, now just sicken me.
Habits.
I pop the car trunk and grab the 10lb hammer and smash her head in until she turns starts to fall apart. I hear an inhuman scream as Vycheslav feels his bond with his childe crumble, then it turns to horror as he crashes through the warehouse wall.
He’s charging at me like a bull moose.
I ready my hammer, worry over the hole in my gut, grab cartridge to my tool, and then watch Selim do something… Amazing?
I know he used Obfuscate because the details are fuzzy, but its like he used all his blood at once to slice and dice Vycheslav up six ways to sunday. He was a black blur in the night, using his knife to pierce the chitin of the Fiend, the wounds burned with some acid like substance from his blade, tentacles of shadow reached into the wounds and ripped them wider, and vitae poured out like a faucet.
Selim spat something that melted Vycheslav like acid.
This all took seconds. I start to realize why the Assassins were feared in the revolt; displays like this don’t happen in public often.
Even more terrifying is that Vycheslav was still up. One impossibly long arm whips out and sends Selim flying into a car. The beast pauses and then the car explodes into flames.
I’m left with a steaming, hissing, melting beast that wants me dead, while I stand over the remains of it’s childe. So, I do the smartest thing, of course.
“Come at me if you think you’re hard enough!”
The beast snorts, and charges. And I bare my fangs and hiss; the Fiend pulls up short. I leap across the distance between us, burning blood as I go; all I have is my hammer and one final spike capsule.
Thank you, gods of science, for what I am about to do.
Despite the gaping hole in my gut I am not as injured as I might have been, but it is hard to act with all my strength with my abs fairly shredded, but I manage. I focus my blood into my muscles, triggering the gifts of Caine, Potence swelling my frame and the Celerity quickening my focus.
With one hand I jam the needle into the fiend’s knee; immediately the chitin nearly explodes and cracks all around the joint. I finish the job by swinging the hammer around at the other leg, and I hear it crunch and pop.
I don’t come out clean, the ape arm swings down and grabs my neck, we both fall. Vycheslav is pulling me to his mouth things, making a buzzing sound that I interpret as laughter.
Then I hear a sound like a cracking steel plate and I look up. Selim, looking a little singed around the edges, is kneeling on the Fiend’s back, his knife crawling with shadows, buried in the monter’s back.
“Vycheslav, my friend, it is time to rest.” Selim twists the dagger, and the metal fails. I see the face in front of me go slack and start to shrink; soon Vycheslav is back to his normal self, then he dessicates further, turning to dust. Selim takes the dust and rubs the grit into the blood running down his cheeks. A moment later Ramirez does the same. They both weep for a fallen friend, an ally, an enemy. I just shiver with exhaustion.
She turns to address the crowd of Kindred, the knot of loyalists in the center. “We will be Anarchs! Finding a new road, forging a new way! We shall not abandon our brotherhood, our teachings, our end goals. But I will not spend your vitae unless in defense of what we hold. Our laws shall be simple: I shall be the only one to say who will kill, or be killed. I shall not chain you with a blood bond and any that do so to others will face my wrath. We will not slaughter the kine in the name of entertainment, and seek to improve our herds. The Masquerade makes some fucking sense, so let’s use it. Form around your Ducti, elect four bishops, and then work out your territories. I shall respect your freedom and you shall respect my duty to you all.”
“What about us?” says one from the loyalists.
Ramirez glances them over, one by one. She looks haggard, tired. “You can stay, you can go. Try to establish the old way, try to call in allies, and I shall call down the Hunt and declare your hearts blood open season. I strongly encourage you to find new opportunities elsewhere. You are of course welcome to stay and try to influence the madness I am unleashing; disrupt my peace and I will burn you to ash.”
They all nod; and I start to see how this happened. Young Kindred, not a lot of Path followers. In fact, the die hards are the ancillae, invested in climbing the internal ranks. The younger ones are tired of getting fed into a meat grinder for nothing and Ramirez is turning them into a power base. That’s a powerful argument for us young fellows.
Her logic better be damned solid when the Lasombra Elders come for her, and they won’t give two shits about the young ones. In fact if this takes off the Sabbat could be in for a major overhaul. I should let her know that Tacoma will always be a bolt hole.
She turns to me, those tired eyes. “In time, take my message to the Americas, would you be so kind Francis?”
“I would, and will, Baron Ramirez.” She flinches slightly at her new title.
I jump on top of a car, and raise my fist in the air. “All hail Baron Julia Maria y Ramirez, may she bring you peace and prosperity!”
“Hail!” the crowd comes back, thirty vampires screaming defiant.
“Hail!” they yell a second time, committed to something they can see and understand that is not a giant space monster from beyond time and myth.
“HAIL!”
Liverpool, England
It was time. The Archbishop had mandated that her remaining packs were to gather in their own places and practice a Ritae then they would go on a Hunt.
This, apparently, is a Thing.
But each pack would arrive on it’s own, having their own vinculum reinforced and drawn to a central place for a festival where three humans, reputed badasses, would be told they could take weapons and tools and go forth into the night to survive until dawn. The survivors would then get a share of treasure; literal fucking treasure. Turns out our Miss Ramirez might have been a privateer with her Sire at some point so rumor went. So far only one human, a woman from Chelsea, managed to win by the novel expediency of punching out a cop, pissing on him, and then patiently waiting the five minutes it took for his radio to register that he was prone.
Before that she’d managed to torpor one over eager lick by luring him out in front of a truck, got a pack mate of that one to follow her to hobo town; they never found his remains - Hobos have some fucking teeth in England, and then got the Ductus by running into an Arsenal bar and when he showed she screamed that the Chelsea loving fucker had laid a hand on her. He was stomped into red paste by the bar inhabitants.
Don’t fuck with drunk soccer hooligans in their place of power.
The Old Bill arrived, was a wee harsh on her, and couldn’t understand why she was laughing the entire time. The beating was less than the Sabbat would have done; she spent a nice night in lockup, made bail, and was promptly given her reward and the Embrace by Ramirez.
Trading most of a pack of over eager fucks in trade for an extremely capable childe was a good bargain for Ramirez. I believe they call her childe ‘the Bitch.’ You can hear the capital letter.
Of the forty remaining Sabbat I have to kill 8. Two ducti, a priest, and a pack of four. And Vycheslav; can’t have him running around. Selim is helping me because wholesale slaughter is really super hilarious for him and he wants to, as he put it, ‘get his blades wet.’
I hate it when he watches Jersey Shore.
Our first target is the pack of 4; they hunt as a group and tend to work the same part of town. They like to prey on Muslim women coming home late from their jobs. Doing their part to ‘thin the damn Camel Cunts down a notch.’
Selim is really excited about this group. Killing them will raise the class in the neighborhood and punish racist shiteheads.
They are lead by a Brujah, have two caitif, and a Malkavian. All of them are about twenty years dead. And they are really into their pack tactics.
Selim has disguised himself and I as women. We are wearing burkas in order to make the illusion a little easier but Selim assures me that women have been moving in such clothes in such ways to elicit interest for centuries. “After all, how do you think babies come about?” He laughed for a good minute after that one.
We’re walking through the area, chatting back and forth. Selim has given me a spattering of Arabic so I can follow along. We know we have our crew when we spot a menacing man in a leather jacket and a shaved head behind us. He grabs his crotch and whistles, so we hurry away from him down the street. A block down he’s still following us when another bloke with too much metal in his face approaches from the side. We duck into an alley, hoping to get past them by going around when we see the other two coming from the front of us, the two behinds are laughing and hooting.
They say a bunch of things that are really not polite. Seriously; my countrymen can be right cunts at times and this is one of them.
We let them get close, as we cower and cling to each other… The skinhead grabs for me and the sawed off bar gun unloads two barrels of buck shot into his face.
His head splashed away. At first I wasn’t sure if he was a lick, but then his body decayed unnaturally fast.
I hear Selim start to work with his knives while I catch the other one starting to realize things had gone south. I’ve dropped the scatter gun and pulled my second one; he’s just started to turn around when I catch up to him and place it against his spine, blowing both barrels through his guts.
His legs stop working so well. I check back and Selim has just removed the head from one of the assailants, his other knife having punctured the heart of his victim. You destroy the heart and a vampire loses a tremendous amount of vitae; if these guys were feeding like this they might be already low.
I take my time to reload; as I watch the bastard’s spine is starting to click back into place, muscle and intestine pulling back in. I put the barrels against the fucker’s neck. I’d say something but fuck, this isn’t American cinema.
One more loud boom and the lead splashes his brains like a watermelon dropped from the top of the St. Paul’s Cathedral.
We took these guys out because they were the youngest and the easiest. We flee from the scene, in our burkas, black and flapping. Selim once again has us as women and we scream from the alley way in case anyone investigates. Ramierez assures us she has people in CID who can explain why the bodies decayed so much so quickly.
The cops will assumed the community protected it’s own and it will be unsolved. Selim insured this by using kitchen knives, cheap ones, to do his murder. I used cheap buckshot and sawed-offs, so not really an ideal ballistics scenario.
Off we go.
Thirty minutes later and we are outside the a lovely enough house in a new development towards the edge of town. This is a very new development and is still under construction, nice place for doing dark deeds in the middle of the night; burn the place down when you leave, thank you very much. A little note from a local environmental group and bam, instant suspects.
The bloke here is a Toreador. He’s into sick shit, but his priest has been wanting to move up the ladder; we’re here to make that happen.
He had one little stop at a convenience mart; I needed a pizza, a 2-liter and a pint of ice cream. I have a jacket with a name tag that says ‘My Name is Edgar!’.
I spray some glue on the back of the jacket and slap a patch of a well known pizza shop logo on it.
I knock on the door of the house with lights on the front porch, car running. The street is empty of cars and people, but music is thumping from the house. I’m holding an insulated bag with a steaming pizza in it.
The door opens and a chick who is waaaay to into the the raccon eyes look pops the door open and has a drawling “Whaaaat the fuck you want?”
“Uh, is uh, Kevin here? I got a pizza, for, uh, Kevin Schaltzburg?”
She looks at me for a moment, her eyes sharpening. They must have had their vinculum not too long ago; Kindred Vitae can get you a little fucked up if you aren’t too sharp to begin with. “Yo, we got a Kevin Shaltzburg here?” Her voice is high, buzzing, and pleading.
From the back I hear a “What the Fuck!?” and then stomping, mad footsteps.
“Who would dare to use that name before me? I am Melchior, you fucks!”
I’m a little agog. In front of me is a man. A mostly naked man. At least where it counts. Spattered in blood, covered in latex, chains, and holding a whip in his hand, and about 500 hundred pounds. Vampires tend to thin out a bit in the change, so he had to have been fucking huge before that. I could see the outfit he was wearing was struggling to hold together under the strain.
Time to set that latex free.
“You, uh, ordered a pizza Mr. Shaltzburg?”
He turns purple. Straight goes from pale, to red, to puce. “Don’t call me that!” he screams.
I flinch in my role. “But, it’s your favorite order, according to the computer? Triple meat with extra cheese?”
Skinny goth bitch is behind him, laughing. She manages to be silent but then a snort comes out of her mouth parts. Vitae is streaking her mascara.
Kevin, or I guess ‘Melchior’ now, goes purple black, then immediately goes to being pale. “Come in, come in, I must grab my wallet.” I hesitantly enter the house and see four other blokes on the couch; one of whom does not fit. He’s a young man in a hoody, clearly out of it from blood loss. Every time gets a little too aware they raise his wrist and the vampires sip a little more.
The boy manages “-Momma?” before I see them grab a wrist and neatly nip’n’sip.
Kevin opens a door, I hear a screaming moan, then the door closes. I don’t hear what happens downstairs; but a minute later he’s back up with a wallet.
“Here we are… That’s 20 quid, with tip, right?” the fat man purrs out.
“They added a delivery fee. So, 22 now. But I’m glad you’re still ordering with us sir.” I hand off the soda and the ice cream to goth girl, and put my hand in the back of the bag. I open the bag up and hand the pizza to Kevin, who frowns with his money in hand.
“I’m sorry, but this isn’t the pizza…” He’s looking at the box, which he is absolutely right on. Nothing like his old pizza delivery company.
Neither is the shotgun in my hand from the hole I cut in the back in the bag. Kevin’s face is erased in a sheet of flame from the Dragon’s Breath round - Selim gave me one for the evening.
The resulting fire and chaos allows me to slip out the front door; back in the car and Selim and I are off to target #3.
Target #3 is a ductus/priest. She fulfills both roles with two personalities; a little odd but hey, Malkavian.
We get to her pack’s haunts in an hour. Ramirez is calling her meeting in an hour, where we will hit our last targets.
An apartment building; they are the worst. Have to be very tight, very controlled, can’t mess about.
We creep through the lower floors up to floor 5. There are two more floors above us, but the target is on 5, so we creep down the hall.
We get to apartment 9, and the door is already open. The pack is all gathered and their Priestess is guiding them through the rites. Her arms are raised as if supplicating the heavens, vitae trickling down her arms and spattering like little rubies on her white silk shift.
She finishes her chant, and even though we are unseen she calls out, “Killers! I am prepared for my end!”
I drop my mental efforts to cloud my presence and I see Selim do the same. The others, there are four of them, they start forward with a growl but the Priestess throws out her arm. “Stop! I have forseen this, and I have known it was my doom. This sacrifice prepares the way for you to live. My pack, my children, I love you as I have loved no others life or death and my vision saw you fall with me. Follow Ramirez, though the path seems treacherous, she shall lead our Sword in a new direction, become her Shield and learn the Childer in the ways of righteousness.”
As one they intone, “Yes Mother.”
I draw my sword and step forward. The Priestess kneels, smiles blindingly. I realize that her glamour aside she is an old woman, the hair is gray despite the smooth face. “You know Ileana Cardae.”
Shocked, I nod.
“Carry these words to her: The blood has heard, and listened. It may not understand, but it knows.” She bows her body forward and shouts into the floor, “Do it!”
My arms come up of their own accord and I chop down, as if aided by some power, and my blade shears through her neck with little resistance. She crumbles to ash before my eyes, and I look at Selim for reassurance.
He is shaken, praying. We leave quickly and try to pretend it didn’t happen.
But I will remember the words.
Our last two targets are going to be at the Hunt.
We arrive at the warehouse on the docs. It is 2am, and I’m thinking of Seattle in the winter, and not London for some reason.
Inside Ramirez is talking.
“We all here? Good, my last two are here. Everyone, share your grievances.”
There is a babbling for a moment, then goth girl comes forward. “We are under attack! An assassin came to our haven, burned it down, and killed Melchior!”
“And I have received word that the 12th street Prowlers have been discovered without their heads,” Vycheslav adds.
The robed Kindred step forward as a group and speak in unison, “Our lady gave her life so we could live.”
Ramirez nods. “Yes. She did.”
The Archbishop pauses. “We have been Sabbat for a long time, brothers and sisters. But what is it getting us?”
Murmurs as the crowd processes this heresy. “We are the Sword of Caine, Archbishop! Surely you can see the struggle is to free ourselves from the chains and tyranny of the Ancients.” Vycheslav is fervent, despite looking like a pimp who got robbed.
“Right. The Sword of Caine… But what if we weren’t? The Sword of Caine, that is? What if we were just used against our clan founders as a play in the Jihad? I ask this because I’ve fought for the Sword for hundreds of years, Vycheslav, and I don’t think we are one iota closer to victory since we gathered at Thornes.”
“Why are you saying these things Ramirez?” Vycheslav is nearly in tears. I think he really cares about Ramirez in some way.
She looks at him a little sadly. “Because when I listen to my blood and my Beast it tells me that the assassinations and the assaults having nothing to do with the Book of Nod and the Sword of Caine. Caine’s grandchildren care little for their progeny and we’ve never killed anything older than a millenia; in fact far younger. We are sending our own Childer and their Childer and Their Childer out to slay our own generation Vycheslav. We spend their lives like water poured upon the desert. And for what?” Ramirez is way too reasonable. But you can just hear the moment when she decided that the Sabbat were fools.
“For the Glory of Caine! For the Freedom to choose…” Vycheslav starts to rant.
“To choose how to die? By the fangs of the ancients, or the fangs of the elders? Or the fangs of their peers? Do not be fooled by rhetoric Vycheslav; I am no Giangalezzo. I am not betraying us to the Camarilla; I propose we go back to our roots. We started as a revolution; against the perfidy and corruption of our Elders. We changed with the times to fight the forces of hunger that will awaken for our blood. I say that the crusade is failed; our resources dimmed, and our blood has bought nothing.” Ramirez rips out each word, flung like razors at the crowd gathered before her. “I say that our own elders have grown too much like that which we rebelled against. I say that we are not winning this game and neither is the Camarilla - So who is?”
Vycheslav is growling, “Your conspiracy theories do nothing to hide your traitorous words…”
“Traitorous? Because I view our blood as a finite resource to guarded and spent with care? Because I’m tired of rigging vinculums for favors here and there? Of watching the Monomacy used not as a tool of determining the strong but as one of political control? We are done, Vycheslav. We can keep our ways, find a new path, a new way to play the game. Not the Camarilla, but the Anarchs. A name only to describe how we make a new contract, a new pact. A new Sabbat.” Ramirez is winding down, Vycheslav takes this as weakness.
“You have gone insane! The Consistory, hell, your own clan will turn on you! You can’t do this Ramirez, it will be a betrayal…” Vycheslav trails down as the fury fills Ramirez.
“Like you betrayed me, Vycheslav? You signed a pact with Yuria! That you would rule here as Archbishop and let your ‘Sister Yuria’ seek the hearts blood of every Elder in southern England. You killed my priests, my Bishops, my Templars. You have been planning this for a decade and you speak of traitors?” Ramirez throws some papers snatched from her waistband onto the ground. They are copies of the correspondence with Yuria starting a week after Chase Covington was sentenced to death.
The first time.
Vycheslav stares at the papers, and then sheer hate pours from him. “I knew what you were planning, even if I couldn’t prove it of your allies. She told me about your ‘plans’ and how it would be. I had to keep us pure, had to keep us clean, from your filth. I had hoped you would see the error of your ways after I named your allies and supporters to her pet Roman…”
I watch as the crowd steps back from Vycheslav, except for six some odd licks too loyal or dumb to know how badly this was going to go. Goth girl has lead her whole pack away from Vychy, so she clearly was the up’n comer.
“Fuck you Vycheslav Rasilovich!” I scream.
Okay, don’t know where that came from.
“Who dares-?” he manages as I charge up to him.
“The Anarch representative. I came here at Ramirez’s invitation. I’m from motherfucking Seattle. Heard of it?” Gotta keep the momentum...
“A city on the West Coast of America, yes, but…”
Momentum. “We have this ancient thing out there. You know that? Heard some crazy bullshit rumors out of there? Guy named Siegfried? Vancouver? Has a lot of werewolf pals?”
“Rumors, lies, yes. But-”
“Fuck. You. It’s true. The Tremere started killing Gangrel in job lots out there, don’t know why. But something asleep under Vancouver stirred. Now the werewolves and the Gangrel are becoming besties - Hearing about that?”
“Propagan-”
“Fuck. You. Thrice. It’s true. The Gangrel are independent, they are Camarilla, they are Anarch, they are… Fuck all. Everywhere you look there are schisms, breaks, and movements. Things are breaking down because the Ancients stir - But also because the fuckery you are doing. Is. Not. Working.”
“Look you Anarch piece of-”
“And four times fuck you. If you had a thing worth listening too I would have heard it by now. In fact I wouldn’t be able to hear it until the Infernalist took the dick out of your mouth. We know how to handle a Infernalist in the Anarchs - We don’t torture the shit out of people thinking that a dirty fucker is among them. We just look out for each other and when a guy gets out of line we take him out back behind the woodshed. So, you even fuck that up.”
Vycheslav, a renowned Inquisitor, loses his shit. I get a back hand the flings me across the room. My face does not feel good, at all.
The Fiend stalks towards me and Selim appears out of no where. “Vycheslav, I remember those nights when we were Neonates in the Revolt. This childe is mine to watch over, for our brotherhood, do not advance.”
Huh. I guess the old guys really do know each other.
“Selim…” Vycheslav hisses out. He’s in a frenzy, but riding it. And he just drops out, like that. No effort of will, just drops…
Wow. Something to be said for that, whatever it is.
“I will kill him, Selim. And it seems I will have to kill you as well.”
“So be it. Archbishop Julia Maria y Ramirez, I request of you a boon! There shall be a Monamacy between Vycheslav and myself. My ties to the Sabbat are ancient, as old as Vycheslav’s - I have partaken of the rights and oaths of brotherhood; do you recognize my claim to the Sabbat?”
This is some old form kind of thing. The foundations of the three major sects, if Anarchs could be considered such, are all tied up hundreds of years ago. I know the Assamites were the demons of the East and had allied themselves to the Great Revolt against the Elders…
“I do, as does Vycheslav. We have all drunk from the same cup; Selim is a Brother in the Crusade.” Ramirez is somehow holding this group together when it occurs to me that they have no middle class. Most of the licks we took out were young, maybe twenty years dead at most. The Priestess was the oldest by far, and she went willingly or the building would have been destroyed…
They have no Ancillae to speak of. You last longer than fifty years in the Sabbat and you are an old timer. Two hundred? That makes you an Elder. And anything over that is probably in a leadership role because they have survived so long… Man, that makes the power pyramid even more pointy than the Cam.
So, all these young Kindred are watching their parents and grandparents have a fight. Ouch.
“Now you use the forms you are abandoning?” Vycheslav spits at Ramirez.
Ramirez won’t meet Vycheslav’s eyes. “I never said abandon, I said find a new way. Dogma is doing nothing but killing us Vycheslav - The choice is the fangs of our own or the fangs of our foes; I’d like to remove one set of fangs from the equation.”
“Fine. I do acknowledge your claim. Shall we fight blind?”
Selim shakes his head. “No. We borrowed the Monomacy from the Lasombra, let us do this in our way.”
And they fought.
Selim pulled his sword and knife; Vycheslav strips down and starts to grow incredibly rapidly. In an eye blink he is two feet taller, covered in coarse hair and oily black chitin, his face a lizard/insectoid horror.
They circle one another, then Selim moves in with a blur and there is a crack as Selim’s sword shatters into red hot fragments. They step back, and I realize that this is going to be a move/counter move battle.
“I liked that sword, Vycheslav. It was a favorite. Clearly you have grown in power since we last fought.” Selim is poised and ready with his dagger, a curved thing like a crescent moon.
Vycyeslav’s face moves in something that could be called a smile if nightmares dripping black ichor are considered ‘smiley’. He moves an arm lazily through the air and we see arrows form from the air itself and speed towards Selim- And the arrows break into shards just before hitting him.
Vycheslav looks confused for a moment then roars. Selim chuckles, “My sire, may he live long these nights, is a Sorcerer. He prepared me for foes like yourself.”
Sorcerer? Fucking Selim is a… MOTHER FUCKER.
The fight continues like this for an hour, move, counter move, move. At each interval they break, and I realize that they are not spending blood in the same that I would. They are slow, methodical, and above all preserve their resources.
And boy is this boring.
Time to get my last target.
This would by Vycheslav’s second, his Childe. I spot him in the group of seven die hards, stony and silent, he has the bone ridges on his/her scalp. Androgyny, apparently a thing with Tzimisce.
I go to the outside of the warehouse and Summon him/her. Everyone is focused on the fight; so I have a chance at this. I wait by the car and grab a tool from the back seat. I cloak myself in the shadows, and wait.
Pretty soon Vycheslav’s child comes wandering out, he/she getting within three feet of me. I watch her, pretty sure it’s a her now, closer her eyes and then look straight at me. “I have my sire’s magicks. I can see you, Anarch.” I can hear the 'k' in magick, the way she says it. What a fucking wanker.
Suddenly she’s got bone spurs and claws and scary shit coming off her. I can hear dogs in the distance, so I know what that means, her friends are coming.
So, I swing with my tool. Her arm sinks into my gut like it was made of soft pudding, and she’s ripped her shark toothed and barbed limb free and clear taking bits of me with it. Her face is lunging for my neck - she is so fast - with every tooth a fang in a mouth far too wide.
The tool connects. The side of her head, at the temple, the weaker spot of the skull… I just shoved a metal rod, medical grade precision steel, with channels cut into it, into her skull. The rod has a square pointed tip, made for piercing through tough things like Kindred bones. It is attached to a canister that is insulated and holds about four oz of liquid nitrogen.
Contact pops an internal seal, and the hammer/pick looking device then spews pressurized nitrogen at very cold temperatures through the needle.
She gets the brain freeze from hell.
It doesn’t turn her head into an easily shattered object; it just increases the internal psi in her skull by several orders of magnitude as the nitrogen expands and boils off, quickly. The skull which now has a hole in it’s side.
My tool pops free with a hiss-crack and a puff of escaping gas. Then brains squirt out the side of her head until enough gas escapes to equalize pressure. My assailant falls to her knees and shrieks as she loses, well, her mind.
I thumb my quick release and the cartridge drops. I load another in and move in just as Ms. I-Can’t-Decide-My-Gender-This-Week-Because-I’m-So-Cool shakily stands up. She looks at me dumbly when I do the same thing, just to her heart.
Vampires are mystic creatures, but we follow a few rules. First, the heart is a thing. Two, the circulatory system is largely intact for a looooong time. And unlike the brain, when you inject pressurized gas into a circulatory system it tends cause embolisms and burst blood vessels. Kindred are more resilient, but I just added a lot of pressure to a system not designed to handle actual air.
Blood bursts forth from her nose, her mouth, her ears. Blood jets out from the hole in her head. Blood seeps from her skin and her left eye literally pops.
“Fuck your ‘magick’. Only shit heads use a ‘k’ in magic - It’s spelled with a ‘c’ like with science - you fucked up fleshcrafting bitch.” The words, I use them because I used to think they were funny, now just sicken me.
Habits.
I pop the car trunk and grab the 10lb hammer and smash her head in until she turns starts to fall apart. I hear an inhuman scream as Vycheslav feels his bond with his childe crumble, then it turns to horror as he crashes through the warehouse wall.
He’s charging at me like a bull moose.
I ready my hammer, worry over the hole in my gut, grab cartridge to my tool, and then watch Selim do something… Amazing?
I know he used Obfuscate because the details are fuzzy, but its like he used all his blood at once to slice and dice Vycheslav up six ways to sunday. He was a black blur in the night, using his knife to pierce the chitin of the Fiend, the wounds burned with some acid like substance from his blade, tentacles of shadow reached into the wounds and ripped them wider, and vitae poured out like a faucet.
Selim spat something that melted Vycheslav like acid.
This all took seconds. I start to realize why the Assassins were feared in the revolt; displays like this don’t happen in public often.
Even more terrifying is that Vycheslav was still up. One impossibly long arm whips out and sends Selim flying into a car. The beast pauses and then the car explodes into flames.
I’m left with a steaming, hissing, melting beast that wants me dead, while I stand over the remains of it’s childe. So, I do the smartest thing, of course.
“Come at me if you think you’re hard enough!”
The beast snorts, and charges. And I bare my fangs and hiss; the Fiend pulls up short. I leap across the distance between us, burning blood as I go; all I have is my hammer and one final spike capsule.
Thank you, gods of science, for what I am about to do.
Despite the gaping hole in my gut I am not as injured as I might have been, but it is hard to act with all my strength with my abs fairly shredded, but I manage. I focus my blood into my muscles, triggering the gifts of Caine, Potence swelling my frame and the Celerity quickening my focus.
With one hand I jam the needle into the fiend’s knee; immediately the chitin nearly explodes and cracks all around the joint. I finish the job by swinging the hammer around at the other leg, and I hear it crunch and pop.
I don’t come out clean, the ape arm swings down and grabs my neck, we both fall. Vycheslav is pulling me to his mouth things, making a buzzing sound that I interpret as laughter.
Then I hear a sound like a cracking steel plate and I look up. Selim, looking a little singed around the edges, is kneeling on the Fiend’s back, his knife crawling with shadows, buried in the monter’s back.
“Vycheslav, my friend, it is time to rest.” Selim twists the dagger, and the metal fails. I see the face in front of me go slack and start to shrink; soon Vycheslav is back to his normal self, then he dessicates further, turning to dust. Selim takes the dust and rubs the grit into the blood running down his cheeks. A moment later Ramirez does the same. They both weep for a fallen friend, an ally, an enemy. I just shiver with exhaustion.
She turns to address the crowd of Kindred, the knot of loyalists in the center. “We will be Anarchs! Finding a new road, forging a new way! We shall not abandon our brotherhood, our teachings, our end goals. But I will not spend your vitae unless in defense of what we hold. Our laws shall be simple: I shall be the only one to say who will kill, or be killed. I shall not chain you with a blood bond and any that do so to others will face my wrath. We will not slaughter the kine in the name of entertainment, and seek to improve our herds. The Masquerade makes some fucking sense, so let’s use it. Form around your Ducti, elect four bishops, and then work out your territories. I shall respect your freedom and you shall respect my duty to you all.”
“What about us?” says one from the loyalists.
Ramirez glances them over, one by one. She looks haggard, tired. “You can stay, you can go. Try to establish the old way, try to call in allies, and I shall call down the Hunt and declare your hearts blood open season. I strongly encourage you to find new opportunities elsewhere. You are of course welcome to stay and try to influence the madness I am unleashing; disrupt my peace and I will burn you to ash.”
They all nod; and I start to see how this happened. Young Kindred, not a lot of Path followers. In fact, the die hards are the ancillae, invested in climbing the internal ranks. The younger ones are tired of getting fed into a meat grinder for nothing and Ramirez is turning them into a power base. That’s a powerful argument for us young fellows.
Her logic better be damned solid when the Lasombra Elders come for her, and they won’t give two shits about the young ones. In fact if this takes off the Sabbat could be in for a major overhaul. I should let her know that Tacoma will always be a bolt hole.
She turns to me, those tired eyes. “In time, take my message to the Americas, would you be so kind Francis?”
“I would, and will, Baron Ramirez.” She flinches slightly at her new title.
I jump on top of a car, and raise my fist in the air. “All hail Baron Julia Maria y Ramirez, may she bring you peace and prosperity!”
“Hail!” the crowd comes back, thirty vampires screaming defiant.
“Hail!” they yell a second time, committed to something they can see and understand that is not a giant space monster from beyond time and myth.
“HAIL!”
